Hunting Season (41 page)

“Palace games,” he muttered. He let go of Lynn’s hand and smoothed the hair on her forehead.

“Our divorce was unnecessary,” he said finally.

“Helen got scared of what I was doing while I was with the Agency. She knew more than she should have, and she just wanted out. I could understand that. Accept it, even. But I never wanted to lose Lynn.”

“Did your wife poison the well? Set Lynn against you?”

“Not deliberately, no,” he said.

“This wasn’t a spiteful separation, adultery, or anything like that. Which made it almost worse, because Helen was so reasonable. She just wanted away from me and what I was doing.

Like most men, I thought the career, what I was doing, the things I was learning, were terribly important. I let her go with my pride intact.”

“Mine was different,” she said, surprising herself.

“My husband turned out to be a no-load. He was sort of a career ectopic pregnancy—he was never going to produce anything, but he was determined to stay in the general area of the academic womb. I think that’s one of the reasons I joined the Bureau about then; I wanted to be around real men.”

‘“Real men,”” Kreiss said.

“Inspector Erskine, where are you?”

They both smiled.

“Lynn had to believe that everything her mother was afraid of was true,” he said, smoothing her hair again.

“Kids can sense bullshit, and Helen was genuinely afraid.”

“And you and Lynn were reconciled after the plane crash?”

“Just before, actually.” He told her about Lynn’s unexpected visitation.

“And then this mess.” He sighed.

“You said that the McGarands were probably responsible for the bomb. And that they had been holding Lynn the whole time? At the arsenal?”

Janet suggested they go outside. He seemed reluctant to leave his daughter, but there was obviously nothing he could do for her that wasn’t already being done. He followed Janet down the hall, past the I.C.U nurses’ station. Janet smiled at the nurses and the lone orderly, but they were all staring at Kreiss, whose gaunt face and hulking shape stood out among all the white-coated hospital personnel. He looked as out of place among all the gleaming cleanliness and order of the I.C.U as a bear fresh out of the woods. It had taken a lot of FBI badge waving and friendly persuasion to get them to let Kreiss in to see his daughter. Kreiss had called back fifteen minutes after she had persuaded Farnsworth to stop and regroup, and she had told him immediately that they had found Lynn, that she was alive and in the Montgomery County Hospital. She had asked him where he was, but he wouldn’t tell her. Then she had suggested that she meet him at the hospital, and he had said, “one hour,” and hung up.

Farnsworth had been listening. He called her back immediately to say he would send along some backup, just until they knew what they were really dealing with. She had asked that they stay well out of sight, because she was going to be on thin ice when Kreiss showed up. The RA agreed and they set up a surveillance support zone outside the hospital. She would park her car somewhere where it was clearly visible in the lot. The backup agents would set up around that car in two unmarked vehicles.

There was no time to equip her with a portable radio, so Farnsworth said that if Kreiss put her under duress in the car, she was to do something with lights. When she went into the hospital with him, there would be two agents inside in hospital orderly clothes who would keep her in sight at all times. Her signal that everything was all right would be to open her purse and touch up her makeup.

They reached the main elevator bank and waited for a down car. An orderly carrying a bag of what looked like bed linens joined them at the door. They got in and punched the ground-floor button. The orderly punched the basement button. She had told Kreiss the bare outlines of the McGarands’ suspected involvement in the explosion at the arsenal, but he had offered no response to that. He had wanted to see his daughter;

any discussion of the rest of it could wait.

No one spoke until they got to the lobby and the door opened. Janet

stepped out and Kreiss followed, turning at the last minute to tell the orderly that his shoulder rig was showing. As the elevator doors began closing in front of the surprised agent, Janet made an “I’m sorry about that” face, but Kreiss was already headed for the front door and the parking lot. She caught up with him when he stopped under the marquee at the entrance and looked around at the nearly empty parking lot.

“I have things to do,” he said as he scanned the lot.

“You have backup out there?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I don’t want them following me,” he said.

“They’re out there to protect me,” she said.

“Not to follow you.”

“That something you know, Special Agent?” he asked, looking directly at her for the first time that evening. Actually, it’s this morning, she realized.

His eyes were rimmed with fatigue, but there was a fierce determination back there, unfinished business.

“No,” she said.

“My boss sent them. They may have other orders.”

“I don’t want that,” he said, looking around again.

“What did you say about standing down? Earlier, up there in Lynn’s room.”

“Mr. Kreiss, I need to fill you in on a lot of things. Why don’t we go back inside and let me tell you—” “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said impatiently.

“I don’t want a war with the Bureau. I do want to leave here without having to take evasive measures. You know what a claymore mine is?”

She had been shown a claymore during the training for new agents at Quantico.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“But—” “My idea of evasive measures is to strap a couple of claymores to the tailgate of my pickup truck and then get someone to chase me in a car.

Get the picture?”

She didn’t know what to say.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said again.

“I’ll tell you something vitally important about your bomb plot, and you make sure no one follows me.

Deal?”

She looked around at the parking lot. There were islands of trees between the lanes for parking, and about thirty vehicles scattered around the lot, which sloped gently down toward the main hospital building. Tall light standards illuminated the entire lot. Her car was visible, but she had no idea where the other agents were. Kreiss was waiting, staring at her.

“All right, but there’s a lot you don’t know. As in, they’ve tied you to one jared McGarand, for instance?”

He stared at her for a moment but then dismissed with a shrug what she had just said.

“Give them the all-clear signal, and then I’m going back into the hospital. Tell them I’ve gone back upstairs. I’ll take it from there.”

She still hesitated.

“Look,” he said, “I’m not armed. And like I said, I don’t want trouble with the Bureau, or with you. I’m willing to bet that your superiors weren’t going to tell me that Lynn was here, alive. I suspect that you convinced them otherwise. So I owe you. Again. Give them the signal.” His eyes were boring into hers with a commanding force. She found herself complying, opening her purse, taking out a compact, opening it so that the round mirror caught the marquee light and reflected it out into the parking lot. She pretended to touch up her nonexistent makeup.

Kreiss nodded and relaxed fractionally.

“Okay,” he said.

“Here’s my half. You said your people were all spun up about the possibility of a bomb going to Washington but that now they’re standing down, right?”

She nodded, trying to think of a way to keep him here, to get control of the situation. But this was just like their other meeting, the one at Donaldson-Brown.

“Well, here’s the thing,” he said.

“It was me driving McGarand’s truck south on I-Eighty-one, not McGarand. I believe McGarand’s gone north.” Then, before she had a chance to ask any questions, he spun on his heel and went back into the hospital. She watched him go straight back down the main hallway, until he disappeared through some double doors. She turned and hurried out to her car, where her cell phone was.

What was Kreiss trying to tell them? Farnsworth had said the state police tracked McGarand going to North Carolina.

She stopped, seeing it now. Not McGarand—McGarand’s vehicle.

Which, for some unknown reason, Kreiss had been driving. She waved her arms at the parked cars, calling in the backup agents to converge on her car. Lights came on in the parking lot as she got to the car and two Bureau vehicles slid into place on either side with a soft screech of tires.

Ben Keenan got out of one of them, pulling out his portable radio.

“Where’s Kreiss?” he asked.

“He said he was going back in to be with his daughter,” she said.

“But we need—” Keenan ignored her, and he ordered the agents standing around them to go into the hospital and apprehend Kreiss. Then he got on his portable radio and contacted the agents disguised as orderlies inside the building.

They reported that they had not seen Kreiss return to the I.C.U.

“Shit!” Keenan exclaimed. He ordered a search of the hospital building, and then he turned to Janet.

“Do you know what he’s driving? The state cops want him now, for a felony assault out at a local truck stop.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she said.

“Kreiss was driving McGarand’s truck.”

“Wonderful. So what is it? A Ford? A Chevy? What?” And then, with a horrified look, he understood.

“The earlier sighting? That wasn’t

McGarand?”

“No, sir, it was Kreiss, driving McGarand’s vehicle.”

Keenan shook his head.

“What the rack’s with that?” he said.

“He didn’t really elaborate,” she replied.

“But it means McGarand could be halfway to anywhere by now. With a bomb.”

Kreiss drove down the street that went along the back side of the hospital parking lot. He had earlier parked McGarand’s pickup truck in front of a private residence and walked over to the hospital. Now he was going to go back out to Jared’s trailer and switch trucks yet again, leaving McGarand’s truck and retrieving his own. Then he was going to go north on 1-81 this time and hunt down that propane truck. Acting on the assumption that the Bureau had requested traffic surveillance out there, he had been careful about what he had and had not told Carter. As for what McGarand was really up to, Kreiss didn’t care. His daughter was safe. Jared was dead, and his grandfather on the move. He was going to find this bastard and crush him for what he’d done to his daughter, period. The Bureau wanted McGarand for the explosion at the arsenal;

fine. He didn’t want the Bureau getting to McGarand before he did. The good news was that the Bureau wouldn’t know anything about the propane truck. It took almost five hours to get from Blacksburg to downtown Washington, D.C.” and McGarand had a good head start on him. If at all possible, he wanted to be in Washington before they stopped looking for McGarand’s pickup truck and started looking for his.

Browne McGarand turned off the northbound lanes of 1-81 at 2:30 A.M.

and eased into a truck stop. He’d been driving for almost three hours and needed a rest break and some more coffee. It had been a long time since he had made a really long drive, especially at night. The propane tanker, thankfully, was holding up just fine. With this refueling, he could make it all the way to the final setup point in Crystal City, on the Virginia side of Washington. He wanted to be

there by dawn, and before the major Monday-morning traffic snarl coiled around the Washington Beltway. He would lay up the truck for the day and make a final reconnaissance run to the target. If the situation hadn’t changed since the last time he and jared had scoped it out, he’d make the attack tonight, before all those feds down in Roanoke put two and two together.

He parked the truck out in the back lot after fueling it and walked into the restaurant-store area. The place was not as dead as he had expected, with several zombie-eyed truckers wandering rubber-legged around the brightly lighted store and half the tables in the cafe occupied. He went to use the bathroom and then sat down in a booth and ordered coffee and a bowl of hot cereal. Two Highway Patrol troopers came into the cafe and sat down at a table near his booth. Browne felt a tingle of apprehension, but then he relaxed—there should be no reason for anyone to be hunting him. They were sitting close enough that he could hear their shoulder mikes muttering coded calls, although the weary-faced cops weren’t paying any attention to anything but their coffee.

He knew the federal authorities must be elbow-deep in the wreckage of the arsenal by now. They would think they’d broken up a major bomb making cell of antigovernment terrorists. They would probably never solve the mystery of jared being under his trailer. Browne felt there were three possibilities: Jared got drunk and went under the trailer for some reason and the jack collapsed; an irate and cuckolded husband who was playing by mountain rules; or the hard-looking man who had been snooping around in the arsenal. He was betting on the second theory. His own conscience was clear on that score: He had warned Jared often enough about his philandering and his boozing. They had both been careful not to have anything at home that could tie them to the arsenal.

That concrete power plant would have acted like an auto engine’s cylinder when the hydrogen ignited: a momentary compression, and then a massive power stroke and vaporization of the building. The only device that could indicate what he had been doing in there was the retort, and it had been made mostly of glass. He had put all the spent cinders of copper-nitrite into the boiler fireboxes, where they would look like ordinary slag. The two pumps would have been smashed to pieces, so they should look like just another piece of wrecked machinery in the power plant. The aTF would be all over the place, but he was betting they were stumped. A hydrogen explosion left no trace other than water vapor, which would dissipate almost immediately. A nice clean explosive.

One of the cops at the next table was talking into his radio, repeating